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March 2009

March 31, 2009

I am in Frankfurt for two days this week before heading to Prague for an AU style user event. My client meeting is not until tomorrow, so once I got some work done (and before the EDT people woke up) I managed to take a walk around town and see a few things.

I saw a lot of signs pointing to the zoo, and other attractions including plenty pointing to “bahnhof”. Which reminded me of when I was 15.

The summer after my sophomore year in high school, I won a scholarship to do a short exchange outside of Zurich. At this point, I had studied French for three years, and German for about 15 minutes on the plane. Zurich is on the German side of Switzerland, so this means that I arrived with only the absolutely most rudimentary amount of German skill. Or you could probably say none. Let’s go with none.

Zurich is a lovely place, and back in 1991 (and probably still today) it was a very safe place to let a 15 year old take the train alone from Adliswil and wander around in a clueless American girl fog through the Niederdorf and taking boatrides on Lake Zurich. After a few weeks, I began to notice that everything was named Bahnhof. There was the big Bahnhofstrasse in downtown Zurich, and every town seemed to have a Bahnhofplatz or Cafe Bahnhof as well. There were a lot of things named after Wilhelm Tell, but Bahnhoff really was far more visible.

So I asked my host family one night over dinner who was this Bahnhof person? He must be really famous because so much is named after him. They kind of stared at me funny for a few moments, then nodded and said that Mr. Flughafen was nearly as important.

Man, the internet has made life a whole heck of a lot less embarrassing.

I will write more descriptions and such once I get some work done, but in the meantime I threw my photos up on flickr: Frankfurt Am Main April 2009.

I’ve really enjoyed the WisDOT webcast series, especially when I found out that they are sharing their Civil 3D templates and their implementation story in real-time.

In my opinion, one of the biggest gaps in the Civil 3D public knowledge pool is data and drawing management and organization, especially for large projects.

This week’s WisDOT webcast will go through, in detail, their plans for how drawings will be arranged, how work will be split up between multiple project team members for design, drafting, and analysis. I am very excited about this because I think it will spur a lot of conversation about what has been working for other firms, and give highway, road and transportation systems implementations a sound starting point.

Join us for this series of webcasts where you will see how the Wisconsin Department of Transportation has improved their workflow by moving to AutoCAD® Civil 3D®. Hosted by WisDOT, you'll get hands on demonstrations of how AutoCAD Civil 3D from Autodesk is helping with: Survey Workflow, Design Workflow, Data and Project Management, and more.

In this webcast, you'll learn how WisDOT leverages the power of data shortcuts to help project teams manage design changes. Topics include: Project folder structure, standard naming conventions for data elements and drawings, and an overall project/data management plan for roadway design.

Join this webcast presentation and learn how AutoCAD Civil 3D includes a combination of easy-to-use cross-sectional components called subassemblies to deliver a unique approach to create intelligent models of roads and other transportation systems.

Also note that when you sign up, if you click “Add to Calendar” then say “Open”, it will make an Outlook entry for you that includes the link- so you’ll never forget about a webcast you’ve signed up for again! So go ahead and sign up for all of the upcoming webcasts now.

March 29, 2009

When I started with Autodesk, I received the standard issue desktop computer, which means my old computer was handed down to Mr. Probert. This is an interesting role reversal, for while my desktop had been the first that was ever built especially for me, it now became the first hand me down that he had to live with. This has brought more grunts, sighs and eyerolling in our shared home office than I care to dwell on. He now is forced to game with the video card that nearly caused our demise, and also must deal with the trademarked Dana Sprawl that applies to laundry, sports equipment and desktop apps.

My startup time has never been an issue because I usually hit the button then chase after two small children for about an hour, returning to my desk chair with a lukewarm cup of coffee and oatmeal in my hair to find everything in order- all of my jings and snagits and gotos, skypes, digsbies, yammers and communicators, itunes, audibles,pandoras and otherwise are all happily humming along waiting for the work day to begin.

Mr. Probert inherited this cacophony on the old desktop and promptly swapped master hard drives and created a new profile which left me standing gape-mouthed with USB cord in hand wondering how I was supposed to know what happened on the season finale of Dietribe if I couldn't sync my iPod. He shrugs and says that is what I get for choosing an Apple product. AS IF that is the issue here.

I had been procrastinating on migrating my library, but faced with about 30 hours or so of car, train and plane travel over the next week, I decided that a few hours of setup would be far better than reading the SkyMall instead of watching Bend it Like Beckham.

The actual mechanics of how M65 came back to existence are not terribly spectacular. A new keyboard came from Hong Kong via USPS (signature required) and was easily installed. It was the signature required part that make it all very entertaining.

It was about a year ago, perhaps a bit more. Prospector had been home with me helping with the book writing project for about 8 months at this point. I had him on the waiting list for the really good infant program known to be a feeder for CERN, but the performing arts nursery had been calling and asking for an audition, so I had not yet made up my mind about which situation would suit him best, so for the moment I was juggling him between writing, webcasting and the occasional few hours of sleep.

I had worked out a good system where he would play happily in his playpen while music or Baby Mozart or similar entertainment played on TV. The room with the playpen was just out of sight of my office, but I could duck my head around and check on him without him seeing me and getting upset. This worked for about 30-40 minutes at a shot once a day, and the rest of the day we would play together and I'd just work while he napped.

So I was interviewing for a new job (at Autodesk), and I had used this system to get me through about 5 interviews with raging success. So I had another interview, this time with someone I knew a bit and he was quite intimidating (thinking back on this, I giggle a tad.) I had make sure everything was in order, Prospector was happily shaking jingle blocks and chattering along. It was perfect.

About twenty minutes into the interview (which was going quite well), the doorbell rings. My dogs, two 80lb or so lumbering fools of labrador, turn on their kujo routine and lunge themselves repeatedly at the door while growling, barking, snarling and drooling. I can hear all of this, but I keep telling myself- its the mail lady, she will leave the package and go away. Just keep talking as if nothing is happening.

Then, Prospector understandably starts wailing and shrieking and standing up in the pen shaking the sides. I take a breath and say to myself- she will stop ringing and go away in one second.

Finally two things dawn on me. 1) She isn't going to stop ringing 2) She can see through the window into my living room where she sees two flesh eating, and probably baby eating, dogs alone with a screaming child. This is not a good thing.

So I make some polite pause in the interview and rush outside. If any of you have ever attempted the futility of working from home when children are present, you probably have come to the conclusion that getting dressed is really just a big waste of time. I mean, I could spent his nap time hammering out a chapter, or I could spend it brushing my teeth, combing my hair and finding something to wear other than my father's pajamas. Exactly.

So I rush outside with a headset still on, but looking (at noon) as if her doorbell ringings had distrubed me sleeping off a three day bender. I politely explain that I was on a conference call (yeah right) and thank you very much. I sign for the package and resolve to make a point of being outside for tomorrow's mail delivery wearing a suit. And pearls. Holding a copy of my book.

Returning inside, the child is once again happily playing, the dogs are passed out in a big drooling, smelly heap, and I finish my interview (it would appear successfully), and I take a moment to open the package and realize that this is the organ transplant that just might save my beloved M65 so that we can spend our days together watching movies on airplanes.

Anyone who has build a few corridors and knows how to use targets can usually map out a plan for modeling something somewhat complicated. It all comes down to how many alignments and profiles your are willing to manually create, design and babysit during edits. But what if you could make some dynamic pieces that gave you the information so you could either trace it, or target those pieces directly?

Let's look at a simple example. A bump out along a road needs to be graded at 2%. Now, I could probably pretty quickly make a profile that was 2% higher than my centerline profile, but what happens if I wanted to change it later? Plus, my target alignment has a widening, so it is stationed differently from my main alignment which can be annoying to manage and hard to visualize in your head.

One way to get started is to make a new assembly that is a copy of the one you will use on the final road corridor, only it has a LinkWidthAndSlope subassembly on one side that goes up at 2%.

When I build the temporary corridor, it looks like this:

Now, I make a surface from this corridor and sample it on to a profile view. Probably best to put it on its own profile view so you can see it fully stretched out, but you could also sample it on to the centerline profile view if you wanted.

Now, build an assembly for that region with the appropriate transition lane.

And build the final corridor using the offset alignment and the sampled surface profile as targets.

The nice thing about this is that if there is a change to your road centerline profile, you simply rebuild the temporary corridor and make sure the temporary corridor surface rebuilds, then rebuild your final corridor. Since it is targeting that dynamic surface profile, everything will update. Also, if you wanted to use 3% instead of 2%, you could just adjust the link in the subassembly.

The possibilities here are endless when you think of all of the manual profile chasing you do in your work- how much of it can we eliminate this way?

While this technique works in Civil 3D 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009... Civil 3D 2010 makes it even more fun with dynamic offset alignments and widenings Here's my first attempt at an animated gif to show you how cool these are:

Awhile back I wrote about how I jumped down a rabbit hole and took some art classes. I hope to take a few more this spring as well. One thing that I learned in these classes is that color matters and there is some skill involved with picking colors that work. Now, I do believe that some people are born with a flair for making things look good with no training, but for the rest of us there are some formulas that you can follow so that your exhibits, plans and renderings are appealing.

The reason color came up this week is because I was playing around in Impression. Whenever I visit a design firm, someone pulls out a marker rendering and says "How can we do this without markers?".

Well, Autodesk Impression, which is a subscription center download for AutoCAD Civil 3D and AutoCAD Civil made this:

I've worked in Impression before, but I wasn't very satisfied with the results- I could never get things to look "pretty" and I chalked it up to Impression not being a very good tool.

This was wrong.

If you give a monkey a pack of crayons and they don't draw the Mona Lisa- is it the pack of crayons fault? Um, no. The same as you wouldn't expect dropping Civil 3D into a someone's lap and expect them to be able to produce great designs. There is some skill and experience required.

While civil engineering geometry is what it is, you can't just drag random colors and random fill types into a site plan and expect something appealing to emerge. This is something that I struggle with constantly and I've gotten better, but it has taken daily commitment to sketching and coloring with the kids and seeking inspiration.

For color inspiration, I like this site: http://www.colourlovers.com/ You can scroll through a variety of palettes and pick one that "speaks" to you. Here is one I like for site plans: Landscape 02. Also try Green Mountain State and The Swing Era. This site isn't just good for Impression, but for any work you do- map themes, surface analysis, and decorating your house.

My skills are skill.... poor. Here is something that I am working on whenever I have a few minutes. I like the idea that you can take a pretty standard hard lined CAD drawing into Impression and make it look more sketched. (Note: Civil 3D Parcels are not recognized by any version of Impression, you will have to export to AutoCAD or DWF)

CAD:

Impression:

I've also spent a few minutes every day working through sometime I picked up called "Color Design Workbook"

March 26, 2009

I am working on a 30 minute overview demo for some events next week, and I was thinking that I need to record it (helps me practice) and post it up on youtube. Look for that later tonight or tomorrow depending on how long it takes me to get through Target with Panorama and Prospector.

One small thing that is new in Civil 3D 2010 that I really adore is profile hatch. How many times have you needed to show an area of cut or fill, or perhaps you wanted to hatch the space under the groundwater elevation, or show geological subsurfaces?

There is a new tab in Profile View properties that allows you to select profiles and create hatches between them. The tool uses shape styles- the same ones for assemblies and corridors- to control the color and fill.

The result is a dynamic hatched area that can bring some visual impact to your profile views.

I need to also wrap up our series on geological subsurfaces. If I go through many more "Parts", Mr. Zeeben will start picking on me. (Using Geological Data for Rock Quantities: Part XXIV)

March 24, 2009

Today is the beginning of the official launch. Civil 3D 2010 will be available to download from the subscription center in a few weeks, and will ship shortly thereafter. I'll let you know specifics once I hear the final dates.

I would write this big, long blog post about all of the awesome stuff coming in detail, but truth be told, I am so tired I can barely keep my eyes open. I've spent a bunch of time over the past week writing some AU-style papers for a user event where I am teaching terrain modeling, corridor modeling for stream design and roundabout modeling. I did as much as possible in drawings in the local language to make it easier on my translators and the students. It's pretty hard to follow a roundabout design when the alignments are named in Czech! (Well, not if you speak Czech, I suppose.) I also think I learned how to say "triangles, points and border" and other handy phrases such as that.

So James over at Civil3D.com posted his list of favorites and some videos, and I know there is more on its way all across the Civil 3D blogosphere. You might want to sign up for Tenlinks email if you don't already. I am sure Roopinder will have some listings of key articles as the weeks go on.

Pay items can be built into your corridor model, your pipe networks, and assigned to blocks, lines, hatches and areas. While we have been able to get quanities out of corridors before, it was never in the right form. Who cares about the cubic yards of material in curb? That isn't how we order it and pay for it- we pay for linear feet. The new QTO tools take care of that for you and can produce reports, tables and more. Check out the video on youtube, or watch below. (The video quality is not the best, I forgot to reprocess it in camtasia before I uploaded it, but hopefully you get the idea. It is narrated by Karen Weiss, our Transporation Technical Marketing Manager.)

March 23, 2009

So we last left our glorious sanitary sewer projects with a pipe trench corridor created. Now for some volumes.

In profile, I've hatched the soil area as green, the softer rock as yellow and the hard rock as red. If at all possible, I'd like to minimize going through the red. (Do you like that hatching? Me too! More on that tomorrow!)

There are many ways to get volume calculations from this exercise. First, I will make a surface from the trench corridor, the simply use a quick volume (Surfaces>Utilities>Volumes in Civil 3D 2009) to compare the different surfaces.

This isn't the most elegant solution, but it is a good way to get started. I will have to subtract the Rock 7200 surface cut numbers from the Rock 4000 numbers since they overlap.

I'd like to show you how to do this with material tables and cross section views, which is a little more robust and also provides nice visuals.

March 20, 2009

In the past, it has taken some time to build intersections with Civil 3D. Certainly, once the model is built, the powerful iteration capabilities outweighed the time spent preparing the model. Also, the time saved in drafting and revisions also made the investment worth it.

We always eat as a family, its just that more often than not our meals were constructed using a mental chart of "choose 1 from column A, two from B, one from C"

And while you could certainly eat worse meals, the hohum factor was huge. I like cooking, that wasn't the issue. The problem is that I never seem to make it a priority to sit down with a cookbook and make a cohesive and somewhat optimized list of ingredients. I wind up rushing through the store, buying whatever random staples I can find, then improvising dinner.

So, I read on the Baby Toolkit about how Relish! changed their lives, and I signed up. It's been a great thing. It's pretty inexpensive, though I don't remember how much. Every week, I download an organized grocery list and five daily recipes. It figures out everything for you- you put in how many people you are feeding and it works it all out. I find I am spending less at the store and feeling much more empowered instead of panicked around 4PM everyday. We eat things like pistachio stuffed chicken and orange glazed pork. Most recipes, except the crockpot ones, are ready in about 30 minutes.

I've also managed to internalize a few recipes for making lunch and weekend meals. Salads are no longer just a bag of greens plus ranch. Here is my new mental chart:

Pick one from each column, mix up in a big salad bowl and top with your favorite vinegrette. I've developed a thing for the Italian dressing you mix yourself- so you can use balsamic and olive oil for one flavor, and red wine vinegar for another.

Seems like a small thing, but having a family dinner with "beautiful food" makes for a nice moral boost- and helps keep your brain working for all that new feature learning.